Tag: sitechanges

My employer, Nokia, announced this week that it is reorganizing Nokia Research Center. The why and how of this operation is explained in the press release.

I learned this on Tuesday along with all my colleagues and have since been finding out how this will affect me. I can of course not comment on any organizational details but it is very likely that I start 2009 in a new job somewhere within Nokia since it looks like the research topic that I have been working on for the past two years is out of scope of the new Helsinki Lab research mission. While I’m of course unhappy about how that decision affects me, I accept and respect it. Short term, I am confident that I will be allowed to finish ongoing research activity since it has been so far highly successful within Nokia and we are quite close to going public with the trial of the system I demoed on Youtube a few weeks ago. I’m very motivated to do this because I’ve put a lot of time in it and want to see it succeed and get a lot of nice press attention.

However, a topic that is of course on my mind is what I will be doing after that and where I will be doing it. In short, I’m currently looking at several very interesting open positions in Nokia. Since I’m doing that anyway, I’ve decided to broaden my search and look at all available options, including those outside Nokia. I will pick the best offer I get. Don’t get me wrong, I think Nokia is a great employer and I am aware my skills are in strong demand inside Nokia. So, if Nokia makes me a good offer, I will likely accept it. But of course, the world is bigger than Finland where I have now spent three years and I am in no way geographically constrained (i.e. willing to move internationally).

So, I’ve updated my CV and am available to discuss any suitable offer.

Since this has happened in the past: please don’t contact me about Symbian programming or J2ME programming type jobs. Not interested in either, I’m a server guy.

I just made a few changes that effectively retires the static portion of my website. For several years I had a nice, funky, handcrafted, css styled bit of html living at www.jillesvangurp.com and publications.jillesvangurp.com. The design has been more or less the same since 2003 and the content was not evolving much either. Actually, most of the activity on my domain has been on blog.jillesvangurp.com which is powered by wordpress.

So as of now, www.jillesvangurp.com is equivalent to blog.jillesvangurp.com. Visiting either will get you to the frontpage of my blog. The relevant portions of the the old www.jillesvangurp.com have been migrated to their own wordpress page. You can find links to these pages in the sidebar. I’ve taken care to not break links from outside to important parts of my old site (publications).

I liked sandbox so much, I looked up the guys homepage at plaintxt.org and found out he has much more goodies. Including the very nice Barthelme theme which has all the benefits of the sandbox theme + better looks. So here it goes ….

I recently got a new phone for testing purposes which is equiped with our new open source browser, wifi, a full keyboard and a nice screen with pretty good resolution (it’s the Nokia E70). Anyway, my regular photo site contains a nice collection of pictures but is a bit too heavy for this otherwise nice phone. So I created a light version of the site which contains almost all my photos and is still only 10 MB. The light version uses smaller thumbnails of lower quality and scales the full pictures to fit in a frame of 350×300 pixels and compresses them pretty strongly. The picture size should just about fit in the browser screen of the E70.

I will still keep my regular site of course and in fact I will upload a large number of new photos from my vacation soon (to both sites). I’m slowly working my way through the 300+ pictures I took with my S80 (I’m processing them chronologically and am about 2/3rds of my vacation). The picture quality is excellent and I am now really happy with this camera. But of course because it doesn’t do much contrast enhancing or other cheap tricks to boost quality at the cost of loss of detail, that means I have to go and edit each of the photos manually. I’m discarding quite a few but still the end result will probably be close to 200 pictures.

I use this nice browser extension called forecastfox that notifies you of the weather outside. Today it came up with an icon I had never seen before and that people in most parts of the world will never see. It’s really cold outside (-22) and forecastfox has an icon for that :-).

Yep, no more comments on this site. I found my mail box full with so-called comment spam. I don’t feel like looking for elaborate half working blocking solutions so I took the easy way out.

Update. Apparently pivot doesn’t actually deny access to the comments but merely omits printing the form and the comments. Of course this is not enough to stop comment spammers. Hopefully setting the maximum allowable hrefs is. If not, I’ll have to edit the php script myself.

Update2. Nope, I’ve edited the script now to always reject any attempt to post.

I received a 9 euro bill for bandwidth usage. A quick look at stats.jillesvangurp.com confirmed that a bunch of assholes has been downloading the frontpage of my site, a lot. As in enough to exceed 11GB.

Well the worst of those bastards have now been added to my .htaccess file. Hopefully that will put an end to it.

Update. I’ve also put password protection on the stats page (which was also showing a list of referrers). The kbyte/per day ration has dropped sharply since I added a few of the worst offenders to my .htaccess file. It seems to be working.

Apparently the pornsites have found my site and are now unleashing their stupid tools on it in order to get their links in my referrer thingy. I’ve been getting thousands of hits from domains with such words as ‘rape’ and ‘perversion’ in them. Presumably this is intended to improve their google rankings. Anyway I don’t feel like monitoring referrerstats anyway.